The roundabout way and even the wrong way are necessary. If you deny this you must also deny that the mistakes of history were necessary. Jung[1]
If something which seems to me an error shows itself to be more effective than a truth, then I must first follow up the error, for in it lie power and life which I lose if I hold to what seems to me true. Jung[2]
Error is just as important a condition of life’s progress as truth.
Jung[3]
To err is human, to forgive, divine. Alexander Pope[4]
Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself. Vilfredo Pareto[5]
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. Oscar Wilde[6]
This essay is a follow-up to my overhearing a student lamenting that she made a mistake. As the Pope quotation above reminds us, we all make mistakes, and so we must be kind–to both others and to ourselves–when we notice mistakes. Jung went further than Pope in his recognition of the commonness of mistakes, and even of their value.[7] In this short essay I explore just why Jung put value on making mistakes.
Jung’s appreciation for history, its lessons and examples
On both personal and collective levels, Jung would have us be familiar with our history: family lore and legacies, stories of ancestors transmitting a sense of background and roots to us over generations.[8] Jung felt that, as individuals we cannot know where we are going if we have no sense of our roots, where we are coming from.[9]
This is equally true for a society. In his book on growth and development, Jung wrote:
“And it seems to me especially important for any broad-based culture to have a regard for history in the widest sense of the word.”[10]
In the context of this essay, history teaches us the ubiquity of mistakes and errors made by both individuals and their societies. In all eras and places, people, parties, princes and kings have made mistakes.
Jung’s recognition, shared with Freud, of how the unconscious can trip us up
The very nature of our humanity, operating as we do with our consciousness a thin layer over a much deeper unconsciousness full of complexes, sets us up for making mistakes. Jung drew on his early years in experimentation, in his Word Association work, when he noted that:
In the association experiment we can ascertain the extraordinarily intense effects emanating from the unconscious precisely through the interference of complexes. The slips and faults in the experiment are nothing but prototypes of the mistakes we make in everyday life, the majority of which must be regarded as due to the interference of complexes. Freud has gathered this material together in his book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. It includes the so-called symptomatic actions – which from another point of view might equally well be called “symbolic actions” – and real slips like lapses of memory, slips of the tongue, and so on. All these phenomena are effects of unconscious constellations and are therefore so many gateways to the realm of the unconscious.[11]
Since our ego minds are not in charge–we cannot control the unconscious and the complexes that lie there[12]–we are not able to prevent these common errors. Lament these as we might, Jung found them useful: they can give us “gateways” into our unknown unconscious depths.[13]
Jung’s recognition of synchronicities, that there are no accidents
Jung often found a timeliness to a mistake and its rectification. The psyche would produce a fortuitous “coincidence of events in space and time”[14] as meaningful beyond the superficial issue of the memory lapse or misunderstanding.[15] Jungian analyst Robert Hopcke tells a story that illustrates how a synchronicity helped one of his analysands to change a mistaken impression that Hopcle did not care about him:
“In the midst of a series of difficult sessions over some time, I came …for our regularly scheduled appointment [amid] a huge rainstorm outside… when, boom, the lights went out. … Frank was convinced that I had become a therapist to control people, …seeing that we weren’t getting anywhere, I decided to … challenge him more openly. I wondered aloud how he might account for the fact that I had showed up in the middle of the rainstorm, with no electricity in the building, so that he could continue to tell me how much he disliked me. Wasn’t that evidence that I cared about him? … Here Frank fell silent and I could feel an emotional shift taking place. After some moments of thought, Frank said, “I see your point. Maybe you do care, maybe it isn’t all about power.” And at that moment, the power went back on and the office was suddenly, synchronistically, brightly illuminated once again.”[16]
Perfect timing!–as if the psyche wanted Frank to “see the light” and correct his mistaken impression of his analyst. Their analytic work flourished thereafter.
Jung’s empiricism and pragmatism
Jung was both empirical and pragmatic in his work as a psychiatrist, i.e. he relied
on his personal observations in his interactions with his patients, and he stressed what worked.[17] He urged his critics to “not misconstrue the findings of empiricism as philosophical premises, for they are not obtained by deduction but from clinical and factual material.” He refused to get into metaphysical speculations or theories and he determined “truth” by its effectiveness:[18]
“If something which seems to me an error shows itself to be more effective than a truth, then I must follow up the error, for in it lie power and life which I lose if I hold to what seems to me to be true.”[19]
Jung understood that the psyche is real[20] and was present in his consulting room when he worked with his patients. In their interaction the psyche offered Jung “factual material” that allowed him to formulate “auxiliary concepts” which served him “as tools.”[21] But he never put concepts and tools before his patients’ welfare.
Repeatedly, by being open to the workings of the psyche, trusting its wisdom and timing, Jung would withhold judgments and watch how the seeming “errors” his patient was making proved to foster healing.[22] Jung found that often what seemed like a “daring misadventure” produced the “light” that was needed in the darkness.[23] The patient’s participation and healing were more important than theoretical rights or wrongs.
Jung’s trust in the wisdom of the psyche
Over decades in both his own life and in his work with patients, Jung came to develop a rock-solid trust in both the reality and wisdom of the psyche. Jung called the psyche “man’s greatest instrument,”[24] existing, “but not in physical form,”[25] and our materialistic culture makes a huge mistake when we undervalue the human psyche. Why do we make this mistake? Jung offers several explanations:
- Our materialistic bias leads us to dismiss all things psychological as “nothing.”[26]
- We exhibit “an almost absurd prejudice to suppose that existence can only be physical.”[27]
- Our society manifests “an appalling lack of wisdom and introspection,” exacerbated by an older “primitive fear of and aversion to everything that borders on the unconscious.”[28] and
- “the primacy of the psyche… is the one thing that life does not make clear to us.”[29]
How might we correct this collective mistake? Jung gives us an answer:
“A great reversal of standpoint, calling for much sacrifice, is needed before we can see the world as ‘given’ by the very nature of the psyche.”[30] Meanwhile, those of us interested in taking up Jung’s task to become conscious of the unconscious can commit to becoming aware of the psyche’s work within us, and how it seeks our welfare and healing in our own lives.
Jung urges us not to strive for perfection, but to recognize our human fallibility
Our ego likes to think it’s right, it has our answers, it can “figure things out.”[31] But Jung understood that our ego minds are not as wise as the psyche, nor does the ego have the more comprehensive perspective that the psyche has. One component of the “sacrifice” Jung mentions as necessary is the ego’s recognition of its limitations, and another is the need for humility: we will never be perfect and striving for it would only foster neurosis.[32] We are humans, and as such, we are fallible. Mistakes are inevitable; the key is for us is to spot what we are meant to learn from mistakes, how they might show us some aspect of our unconscious, or give us an opportunity to trim the sails of our overweening ego.[33]
In those times when our train of thought leaves the station without us, we can enjoy the proverbial “senior moment,” and remind the ego that it is just one aspect of our being.[34] The psyche is real, wiser than our ego, and has no need of trains.
[1] Collected Works 4 ¶644. Hereafter Collected Works will be abbreviated CW.
[2] CW 11 ¶530.
[3] CW 4 ¶451.
[4] Essay on Criticism, l. 325.
[5] Comment on Kepler.
[6] Lady Windermere’s Fan, act III.
[7] As “gateways to the realm of the unconscious,” CW 4 ¶338.
[8] CW 10 ¶656.
[9] CW 17 ¶250.
[10] Ibid..
[11] CW 4 ¶338.
[12] Because these are autonomous; CW 5 ¶467.
[13] CW 4 ¶338.
[14] CW 11 ¶972.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Hopcke (1997), 34-35.
[17] CW 11 ¶530, note 4.
[18] CW 11 ¶530.
[19] Ibid
[20] CW 10 ¶655.
[21] CW 18 ¶1507.
[22] CW 3 ¶109.
[23] CW 11 ¶530
[24] CW 18 ¶605.
[25] CW 11 ¶16.
[26] CW 18 ¶605.
[27] CW 11 ¶16.
[28] Ibid. ¶28.
[29] Ibid. ¶841.
[30] Ibid.
[31] This is a frequent statement I hear from our students, who assume that things of the psyche can be figured out; they soon learn that logic and rationality are not the purview of the psyche. Intuition, feelings and imagination are much more useful in the realm of the psyche.
[32] For an in-depth discussion of the many problems with perfectionism, see the essay “Jung on Perfection and Completeness,” archived on our website.
[33] CW 16 ¶502.
[34] Ibid. ¶219.
